Dynatrace Reviews

We are using it to monitor our e-commerce applications and the full stack that our e-commerce applications run on. That includes both our Rack Room Shoes domain and our Off Broadway Shoes domain. We use it to monitor the overall health of the entire stack, from the hardware all the way to the user interface. And more specifically, we use it to monitor the real user's experience on the front-end.

What Dynatrace has really allowed our team to do is focus more on innovation, rather than on monitoring and bug-squashing. Now that we have a tool like Dynatrace, we can continue to do forward-thinking projects while Dynatrace is doing the monitoring and rooting out the root causes. We're spending a lot less time trying to find out what the problem is, versus letting Dynatrace pinpoint where the problem is. We can then validate and remediate much quicker. That's the impact it's had on our business.

The automated discovery and analysis helps us to proactively troubleshoot production and pinpoint underlying root cause. We recently had some issues with database connections. Our database team was scratching their heads, not really knowing where to look. What we were able to do with Dynatrace, because we had some of the Oracle Insights tools built into the database, was to provide, down to the SQL statement, what queries were taking up the most resources on that machine. We provided that to the database team and that gave them a head-start in being able to refactor the data so it was quicker to query. That really helped us speed up the user experience for that specific issue.

Dynatrace helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and to shift quality issues to pre-production. We are just now starting to use it in that way. When we first launched Dynatrace, we only had monitoring in our production environment. At that point we were using it as an up-front, first-alert tool for any issues that were happening. Now what we're doing is instrumenting our lower environments with Dynatrace so that it will allow us to monitor our load-testing in those environments, to find out where our breaking points are. So it does allow us to push out products that are much more stable and much less buggy because we're able to find out where our breaking points are in the lower environments. What this is going to do is allow us to do is push out, at a faster rate, more solid, less buggy releases and customer features, and allow us to continue to innovate on the next idea. We're just starting that journey. We just got fully instrumented in our lower environments in the last couple of weeks.

In terms of 360-degree visibility into the user experience across channels, we're only monitoring our digital channels right now, specifically our e-commerce channels. But we do have ways, even within the channel, to dissect by the source they came from. Did a given customer come from a digital ad? Did they come from an email? Did they come to us direct? It does allow us to segment our customers and see how each segment of customer performs as well. This is important for us because we want to make sure that we're not driving specific segments of customers into a bad-performing experience or to a slow response time. It also allows us to adequately determine where to spend our marketing dollars.

Another benefit is that it has definitely decreased our mean time to identification, with the solution and the Davis AI engine bringing the most probable root cause to the top. And within that, it gives us the ability to drill down into the specific issue or query or line of code that is the issue. So it has saved us a lot of time — I would estimate it has saved us 10 hours a week — in remediating issues and trying to find the root cause.

It has also improved uptime, indirectly. Because it gives us alerts early, we're able to mitigate issues before they're actually bigger issues.

The alerting systems are definitely the most valuable feature. The AI engine, "Davis," has proved to be a game-changer for us, as it helps to alert us when there are anomalies found in our applications or in their performance. We find that very helpful. There's still a human element to the self-healing capabilities. I wish I could say, "Oh, it's magic. You just plug it in and it fixes all your problems." I wouldn't say that, but what I would say is that the Davis engine gives us that immediate insight and allows us to cater to our solution so that the next time that problem arises it can mitigate it without a lot of human involvement.

Dynatrace's ability to assess the severity of anomalies, based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs, is really good, out-of-the-box. But it does an even better job when, again, we as humans give more instruction and provide more custom metrics that we're trying to monitor that are key to our business. And then, letting the Davis engine find those anomalies and push them to the top, especially as they relate to business impact, is very valuable to us.

We find the solution's ability to provide the root cause of our major issues, down to the line of code that might be problematic, to be valuable.

And we get a lot of value out of the Session Replay feature that allows us to capture up to 100 percent of our customers' real user experiences. That's helped us a lot in being able to find obscure bugs or make fixes to our applications. 

We also use real-user monitoring and Synthetic Monitoring functionalities. We use real-user monitoring for load times, speed index, and overall application index. And we use Synthetic Monitors to make sure that even certain outside, third-party services are available to us at all times. In certain cases, we have been reliant on a third-party service, and our Dynatrace tool has let us know that that service isn't available. We were able to remove that service from our website and reach out to the service provider to find out why it wasn't available.

We also find it to be very easy to use, even for some of our business users. Most of the folks who use the Dynatrace tool do tend to be in the technical field, but use is spread across both the business side, what we call our omni-channel group, as well as our IT group. They all use it for different purposes. I'm beginning to use it on the business side to show the impact that performance has on revenue risk. I can then go back and show that when we have bad performance it affects revenue. And I can put a dollar amount on that. So the user interface is very easy to use, even for the business user.

Dynatrace continues to innovate, and that's especially true in the last couple of years. We have continued to provide our feedback, but the one area that we get value out of now, where we would love to see additional features, is the Session Replay. The ability to see how one individual uses a particular feature is great. But what we'd really like to be able to see is how a large group of people uses a particular feature. I believe Dynatrace has some things on its roadmap to add to Session Replay that would allow us those kinds of insights as well.

We started using Dynatrace in September of 2017. At that time it was an older product called AppMon. But we quickly upgraded to the current Dynatrace platform the following year. We've been using the SaaS platform ever since.

It's been very stable. We've had very little downtime. In the last four years there may have been one outage. Overall, it's been extremely stable. Many times, Dynatrace is our first alert that we have issues with other platforms.

It's extremely scalable. We're one of the small players. We're running with about 70 agents right now. We've been at Dynatrace's conferences and have heard of customers who can deploy 5,000 agents over a weekend and have no issues at all. For our small spec-of-sand space, it's extremely scalable.

We are hosted on Google cloud. That's where all of our VMs are currently set up. Our database is there, our tax server is there. All of our application and web servers are there, and Dynatrace is monitoring all of that for us. We haven't encountered any limitations at all in scaling to our cloud-native environment. We can spin up new auxiliary servers in a matter of minutes and have Dynatrace agents running on them within 15 minutes. We're starting to play a little bit with migrating a version of our application into a Kubernetes deployment and using Dynatrace to monitor the Kubernetes containers as well.

We have plans to increase our usage of Dynatrace. We just recently updated our hosts. We needed to increase the number of host units so that we could put Dynatrace on more servers, and we've already just about used up all of those. So next year, we'll likely have to increase those host units again. And we're going to start using more pieces of Dynatrace that we haven't used before, like management zones and custom metrics.

Technical support has been great. The first line of defense is their chat through the UI, which is really simple. They're super-responsive and usually get back to us within minutes. We have a solutions engineer that we can reach out to as well, and they have been very helpful, even with things like setting up training sessions and screen-sharing sessions to help enable our internal teams to be more productive using the tool.

We were using a tool called New Relic and we were really just using it as a synthetic monitor to make sure the application was up and running, but we really weren't getting a lot of insights. When we decided that we wanted a tool that could give us more insights and that we needed a tool that could give us the ability to monitor more of our customers' behaviors, there just wasn't another tool like Dynatrace that we felt could do things as well as Dynatrace, through a "single pane of glass." We chose Dynatrace over New Relic at the time because New Relic just didn't have any solutions like it.

We haven't found another tool that can help us visualize and understand our infrastructure, and do triage, like Dynatrace. We haven't found one that can give us that full visibility into the entire stack from VM all the way to the UI. That was really the reason we picked Dynatrace. There just wasn't another tool that we felt could do it like Dynatrace.

The fact that the solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery was the second reason that we chose Dynatrace. The ease of deployment, the fact that we could use the one agent and deploy it on the host and suddenly light up all of these metrics, and suddenly light up all of these dashboards with insights that we didn't have before, made it extremely attractive. It required a lot less on our part to try to do instrumentation. Now, as we add more Dynatrace agents to more of our back-end servers, we think we'll gain even more value out of it.

We started with AppMon, which was more of an on-premise version, where we were installing it, although it still was a one-agent. Then we moved to the SaaS solution, and it was very easy for us to migrate from AppMon to the SaaS solution, and it's been extremely easy to instrument new hosts with the agent.

We were up and running within 30 days when we were first engaged with AppMon. When we migrated to the SaaS solution, it maybe took another 30 days and might have even been less. I wasn't involved with that migration, but I worked closely with the guy who was. I don't remember it taking much longer than 30 days to migrate.

We had an implementation strategy. We knew specifically which application we wanted to monitor, and all of the hardware and services and APIs that that application was dependent on. We went in with a strategy to make sure that all of those things were monitored. And now we've progressed that strategy to start monitoring more of our internal back-end systems as well — the systems that support our stores, not just our e-commerce channel — to see if we can't get more value and maybe even realize more cost savings on our brick and mortar side using Dynatrace.

We have definitely seen return on our investment. It has come in the form of being able to produce more stable, less buggy applications and features, and in allowing our team to focus more on innovating new ideas that drive revenue and business, versus maintaining and troubleshooting the existing application.

It hasn't yet saved us money through consolidation of tools, but as we continue to find more value in Dynatrace, it does make us look at other tools and see if we are able to use Dynatrace to consolidate them. We have replaced other application monitoring tools with Dynatrace, but we've not yet consolidated tools.

Whatever your budget is, you can manage Dynatrace and get value out of it, but you need to manage it to what your needs are. That's the one thing we found. We did not budget the right amount to begin with. It has cost us more in the long run than if we would have been able to negotiate it upfront. But we didn't really know what we didn't know until we'd been using Dynatrace for awhile.

Your ability to catch your Session Replay is based on the number of what they call DEM units, digital experience monitoring units. That's where we were short to begin with. There is an additional expense to determining not just the platform subscription but also the number of hosts units that you want to run and the number of DEM units that you need to be able to capture all of the user experiences that you want. In our case, we wanted the ability to capture 100 percent. Maybe in another business someone would only be worried about capturing a sampling of the traffic.

We evaluated New Relic, AppDynamics, AppMon, which was the Dynatrace solution at the time, and we also looked at Rigor.

Dynatrace could do pretty much everything. It wasn't just the real-user monitoring piece of it. It was also the full stack health aspect. The Davis AI engine was probably the biggest differentiator among all of the tools. The Davis AI engine and its ability to surface the root cause was a game-changer.

My advice would be to jump all-in. There doesn't seem to be another tool that can do it like Dynatrace, and from what we've seen the last two times we've gone to their Dynatrace Perform conferences, they are dedicated to innovating and adding features to the platform.

We are not yet using Dynatrace for dynamic microservices within a Kubernetes environment. We are beginning to play in that arena. We're looking at tools that will help us migrate from our current VM architecture to a Kubernetes deployment architecture, to enable us to get more into a no-DevOps type of environment. But today, we're still on a virtual machine deployment architecture.

Similarly, we have not integrated the solution with our CI/CD and/or ITSM tools. That is on our roadmap. As we migrate and transition into a no-DevOps and continuous improvement/continuous deployment operation, we'll begin to use Dynatrace as part of our deployment processes.

The solution hasn't yet decreased our time to market for new innovations or capabilities, but we believe that we will realize that benefit going forward, since we'll be leveraging Dynatrace in our lower environments to find out where breaking points are of new features that we release.

We have half-a-dozen regular users who range from our e-commerce architect to DevOps engineers to front-end software developers. My role as a user is more of a senior-level executive or sponsor role. We also have some IT folks, some database administrators and some CI people, but most of our users are in the IT/technical realm.

We don't have a team dedicated to maintaining the solution. We do have a team responsible for it, though. That is the team that just helped instrument our lower environment with Dynatrace. We've got some shared responsibilities and some deployment instructions that are shared across three different groups. They're from IT, our omnichannel group, which is really our business side, and we leverage a third-party for staff augmentation and they use Dynatrace to help us monitor during our off-hours.

We use the tool for performance analysis, root cause analysis, issue identification, and understanding the impact of technical glitches on business. We use performance dashboards and business dashboards.

The product helps us identify issues in the application and get to the root cause immediately. We can understand why a client experiences slowness, whether it is due to DB or some issue at the front end. It could also be an issue relating to their zone. We can also use the tool to understand the impact of the technical issue and the loss to business.

PurePath is one of the best features. We can add tags to the dashboard that we create. Synthetic user creation is also a good feature.

PurePath must be more robust. Dynatrace detects problems at a higher level. When we select a time zone and identify the problems, we should get a detailed analysis of the impact directly. We shouldn’t have to drill down to get that information since the solution already has the details of the exceptions. We have to create tags for some log-ins. It should be handled automatically to reduce tagging.

I have been using the solution for four to five years.

I rate the product’s stability an eight out of ten.

I rate the tool’s scalability an eight out of ten.

While designing the business dashboard, I encountered various bugs that impacted my work. There were many tickets and conversations between me and the support team. It took a reasonable amount of time to solve the issues.

Neutral

I have used Nagios and PRTG. I started using Dynatrace because my company decided to switch to it.

I rate the ease of setup a seven out of ten.

The solution is not cheap.

It’s definitely a good tool. It is a perfect combination of technical and business. It enables us to identify and make dashboards related to hardware, application, and business. Overall, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

Dynatrace is a strategic application performance monitoring tool. We use it for every use case related to monitoring applications. We use the SaaS solution to monitor on-premises.

We also use Dynatrace for monitoring third-party applications and our own applications.

Dynatrace has the most features compared to other products we looked at. However, the best thing, in my opinion, is the support from the Dynatrace team. They provide a success manager and a team of engineers who are quick to answer questions and provide help. They even assign architects and engineers to ensure our productivity with the tool.

Dynatrace is a complicated tool that requires time and investment to fully understand. It's not something you can simply turn on and use. You need a dedicated team to use it.

So, the only challenge is that it's an extensive tool that requires a significant amount of time to learn.

Moreover, Dynatrace delivers new functionality every month. They have a space on their website where you can request new features, and they actively monitor it. They provide feedback and ask questions about the requested features. Suddenly, those features appear in the product. Dynatrace is really good at incorporating user suggestions. So, there's nothing that I want to add that they haven't already considered.

I've been using Dynatrace for about three to four years. We are using the latest version since it's a SaaS solution. It's always up to date.

Dynatrace has been very stable without any issues. I would rate the stability a solid ten. 

Dynatrace is massively scalable. I would rate the scalability a ten out of ten. 

We have around 200 users using this solution in our organization.

The support has been exceptional.

Positive

The initial setup is actually really easy to install. It's a quick process. You can turn it on and load the SaaS Dynatrace solution in just five minutes. 

However, there is additional configuration and tweaking that may take years to optimize fully. The interface configuration is not easy; given the tool's complexity, it requires time to become familiar with it.

There is maintenance involved. Dynatrace releases patches every two to four weeks. The only painful part there is the agents we run on-prem and on our servers, it needs the agent the application needs to restart.

So, sometimes you delay the update to minimize disruption but the patches are sent to us every month.

Dynatrace is expensive, but it offers good value for the money. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, with one being cheap, and ten being expensive. It is not cheap; it could always be cheaper. 

The license has recently changed to a yearly subscription model. So, it's an annual subscription. We pay even more to have an engineer as part of our team for two days a week. It incurs an additional cost.

I would say to go for it. You won't regret it. Dynatrace has been an awesome product. The complexity of Dynatrace arises from its vast array of features and settings. It takes a considerable amount of time to learn and understand all the options it offers. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

The primary use case is for application performance management. So, we are using it to identify outages of different parts of the application as well as how we can make the application more efficient and rightsize it.

We can see down into the layers, such as with databases. We can see database queries which are causing problems. 

We can see CPU usage for different containers. I can do a run and see what errors exist in containers which are causing problems. We can rightsize containers on the fly and understand what is happening with our Docker, microservices, etc.

The most valuable feature is it has AI in it. The artificial intelligence (AI) engine in it is able to do alerts and some good analytics. During outages, it is able to identify and correlate where the actual root cause of a problem is. This connectivity allows us to be able to see a bit further into the application down through the layers. If it is a problem within AWS, a problem within a container or something that a user did. We are able to see and coordinate that, then we are able to tell the developers how to fix it.

The GUI has the most room for improvement. Sometimes, it can be a little cumbersome to find things and be able to create your own views, or be able to dig in and understand where things are.

Some additional features would be the ability to break out some of the permissions and allow some additional or different ways to tag services, events, and different things which run. We want to push down the ability to do that, so developers and other folks can get in there. Currently, more permissions are needed to be able to do certain things, and we want more people to be able to use it, own it, and understand it.

We don't put very much stress on it. We could probably stress it some more, but we don't have enough systems right now on it to stress it. For the most part, the ships don't cause as much stress. 

We are going to have it on about 40 ships around the world which will run it independently of our AWS platform. Those are don't stress it too much. We will probably stress it at a certain point, along with AWS, but we still very much growing the platform.

It can scale very well and very high. We don't need it to scale as much right now. It is able to absorb a lot of the systems that we have with the agents and and the API Gateways. It seems like it can scale very well when we need it to, so scalability is good for us right now.

If we needed technical support, we usually call our account team to help us figure out where the errors are, whether it is something with an agent or management servers.

It is pretty easy to integrate it into the AWS environment. You give it a username and password and it asks some basic permission. It can pull a lot of information very quickly. We are able to correlate more and provide more data for it. So, it was easy to integrate it into that environment.

We have it running on AWS. It integrates pretty well there. We have it on Red Hat Linux servers, as well as Windows servers. We have it running on VMware where it integrates very well. It understands these productions and understands our platform. It is able to read into Docker containers and all the databases that we run. However, it is limited as far as how many of a certain type of database that we can have, but for the most part, it runs pretty well and integrates very well.

It has been doing a good job of alerting us to issues. It has been very helpful and effective at identifying how we can do things to make our infrastructure and application a little better.

We considered AppDynamics, Datadog, and Crashlytics. We even considered things like Splunk for different pieces of it.

We chose Dynatrace because we needed something which could run both on AWS and VMware on our ships that might lose their Internet connectivity. This product gave us the flexibility of being able to do both. Dynatrace had the ability to run independently, so we could access it while it retains information.

A PoC is the best way to go. Put it against an application and go through the paces of tagging, analyzing, and alerting on it. You can understand what it does and how it does it. Give it a very complex application, so you can see how well it works.

We use the on-premise version because we have it running on VMware. We also use it on AWS to manage our systems on AWS for production and for our non-production environments.

We have hundreds of applications in our organization which are currently instrumented. We define business transactions and provide real-time monitoring for these applications.

Overall, I'd say we're pretty satisfied. However, as a larger corporation - our environment is very, very large, we have over 15 production servers and a total 20-plus Dynatrace AppMon servers - it's increasingly difficult to manage as our environment grows out. It's simply because our team is not fully staffed to support such a large environment, and to do the maintenance work with all the upgrades from 6.5 to 7 to 7.1. We have some challenges where our hardware that we are using today is hosting one servable host with two different Dynatrace AppMon instances, which is not, I guess, a typical setup. So sometimes it's a little bit challenging with the support, but we work through it.

As an administrator for the AppMon servers, we see the benefits every day when we help business teams to figure out some of their problems, troubleshoot to root cause. When we hear of these cases where we save business teams or application support hours or days of figuring out problems, that's probably what we're most proud.

Definitely HA, because we have so many applications that are dependent on AppMon that it has been deemed critical. Any downtime, it just affects so many users. So that's one of our key asks for the future.

Stability is where the "fairly satisfied" comes in. I think it's also due to our environment and having multiple servers hosting dual instances of AppMon, where we've seen a few challenges. We do work with the vendor. However, because we've had instances of down AppMon servers, although we can recover fairly quickly, one of the key pieces that is missing is having high availability. I believe it's coming in 7.1, so it's on the roadmap, we just wish it would be sooner.

As an organization we keep growing, because everybody wants AppMon. Even within my last two years, since I've joined the team, I think we've added four new production servers and probably eight to 10 including dev and QA. However, instead of having two very large Dynatrace servers, we had to scale out laterally. 

We've had challenges. I would say it's not scalable, because we've had to move large applications that were in a shared environment to their own separate Dynatrace server instance. Those are some of the challenges we do have.

Support has been very good. We are in constant contact with our sales engineer. 

They're very responsive, and anytime we do have an issue and raise a concern, we get immediate feedback. We have a good relationship with Dynatrace.

I was not involved with the initial setup. But since I've been there we've upgraded from 6.3 and 6.5, and we're currently rolling out, I'd say, 90% of our environment is at 7, we're just missing one server. I would say the upgrading is fairly straightforward. It was just a lot of work, due to the size of our environment.

When it comes to the nature of digital complexity, and role of AI when it comes to IT's ability to scale in the cloud and manage performance problems, that's the direction that we're already going, and I don't think we can avoid it. It's something that for us, as a large organization, we will need to leverage. I think we will adopt it, hopefully, sooner rather than later.

If we had just one solution that could provide real answers and not just data, the immediate benefit would be that we'd be able to do more work, free up our time to do other tasks. Also, as a trickle down effect, the more time we have to do other people's requests - we have hundreds of applications in our organization  - so the trickle down effect would benefit all teams.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are stability of the product, and HA is definitely on the list due to our nature of our business. Also, new features being added on, that's always a big plus.

I would give it a solid eight. Again, it has a few features lacking or which haven't been there since the inception - the HA - because we've gone through three or four upgrades. When we lose our one server, we might lose two server instances, so it affects more applications.

I'd definitely say sign up for the trial, test it out in your test environment, and get your business users and app support teams involved quickly just to see the benefits. Just being able to look at the PurePaths; the first time I saw PurePaths I thought, "Wow. This is a pretty powerful tool."

Our primary use case right now is that we are dealing with the perfect days and non-perfect days.

We have a certain goal. E.g., for this financial year, we want to have 350 days of perfect days. The perfect days is where every application in the business should have low business impact, all applications should be available, and there are some other metrics that we want to know. 

We have constraints whether this is a perfect indicator, and saying whether it is a perfect day or not. There are some situations where one of the JVM is down, but the other processes, which do the same thing are up. In this case, pretty much there is no business impact. However, there is a technical issue, though no business impact. We can't sell this as a non-perfect day. Yet, it is a perfect day. 

Right now, we are using AppMon. Therefore, we are using AppMon to find out what metrics are available for us to see or indicate what is a perfect day or non-perfect day. That is one of the things. We are also using reactive stuff more for reactive stuff at the moment.

We are using AppDesk on user experience in indexes for customer satisfaction. 

We have been using for almost one year. It has been performing well.

The most valuable feature in AppMon is the PurePaths. Previously, we did not have this feature. The transactions using PurePaths are a good thing. 

We have like different teams like in a cross structure (DevOps, infrastructure, IT, product monitors, and developers), who recently joined the team. They are not aware of what are the missions their touching and what are the other components or services that they are depending upon. Because of all this, it has been very helpful for the developers who just joined the team. It can be explained, "Okay, this is our application. These are all the components that we are touching. Changing any of this might affect all these structural things. If we want to do any changes to this, we might need to put all this in our test cases, then QA it just to make sure we are not corrupting it."

In AppMon, the performance could be improved. That is the one thing I am most interested in. 

The other thing is the database. They might improve the database stuff a little bit more. The metrics and whatever that they are providing for database.

AppMon is lacking the AI that can be found in Dynatrace Managed.

Maybe last year, we had issues interacting with the MQs and the mainframe. They completely resolved this issue in 6.5, so we are now good.

We do not have downtime using Dynatrace.

It does scale well. 

Right now, we have some performance issues with Dynatrace AppMon, but the AppMon team is working closely with us registering the number of issues we are having and providing an extra set of tools that helps us to make the performance of the tool better.

One of the performance issue is when we are trying to bring up user data, such trying to bring up 20,000 or 50,000 PurePaths. That is where it is taking like five to seven minutes. When we are on a call, we do not have that much time. We want to make it approximately less than two minutes. They are doing a great job on that.

I would rate the technical support very well. They work with the inside their development teams to get us the best answer, as much as possible.

We have LoadRunner and Wiley. Our company has used Wiley for 13 years. 

They are one stop tools. If there is an issue, we have a team that always is on call: One should come from infrastructure, another from the data side, another from the product AVR, another from mainframe, and one person from Wiley saying, "These are the threats we have and open systems." So, we have five different people on a single call for a single issue. Sometimes we have 10 to 15 people on the call to figure out the issue.

With AppMon, looking at the translation flows and the PurePaths, we can with one or two members can identify and start to find where the problem is. So, this is a good feature.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We did have technical support help. During the first year, they have given us a resource, who has helped us in setting up the Dynatrace: getting some applications onboard, how to set up on dashboard, etc. This has helped us a little bit getting more familiar with the app and getting up to speed.

We have some demos on the Wiley, but they came very late to the table. Also, Splunk ITSI reached out to us.

For 13 years, we have been using Wiley. We definitely liked seeing the PurePaths being more helpful for us. As to Splunk ITSI, there is more configuration than AppMon. That is the reason we chose AppMon.

If you are implementing it for mainframe or MQ stuff, what are the things available and what are the other configurations that you need to set up.

Right now, we do not have AI capability. We are on AppMon. For us, it is about going and debugging the PurePath and looking into what is the issue: finding out the other use cases or root causes. It is pretty much manual. We are trying to moving from AppMon to Dynatrace Managed within the next six months. We are planning to do a debug on that. Going through all the videos and classes, it seems like Managed makes more sense for us and would be more helpful than AppMon.

If I had just one solution which could provide real answers, not just data, the immediate benefit for my team would be escape being pulled into a call and spending most of the time in analysis finding the root cause. If we are able to find the root cause and fix it immediately, that downtime would be less. That is the biggest benefit.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: customer support. That is most important, because companies do not have the tool knowledge initially, and someone needs support it or they need to hire someone. For companies like us, initially we onboard someone who has much more experience with the application inside the company, because we need some training on the customer support: when to support and what we need to do. 

The next one is writing the PoC, we have to find out whether it is satisfying all our use cases. So, if a system helps us with our issues, that would be great.

It tells me everything I need to know. It tells me what the transactions are. The AI provides you with advancements or degradations in what is happening. 

It gives me visibility into everything, from transactional logs to services and processes to the OneAgent installed on the box, which tells me it's talking to systems that are in development and it shouldn't be.

The most important takeaway is simply the compute. Simply understanding how much, or, the resource adoption across the board. Back in the day, for example, I would need 128 gigs of RAM to run SQL. You don't need that any longer. Having the performance and true metrics of what's going on, as well as scaling your environment to its optimal performance.

Dynatrace works perfectly.

Having OneAgent is the most valuable feature of Dyantrace, as well as the monitoring.

What is web interaction as it relates to Synergy, or when it comes to using web-based, phone-based, or apps published on end-user devices, it's fantastic in terms of performance, and code. Even if you run the release and discover that the update you just released is causing a degradation in performance, auto-release will restore the old code without missing a beat.

I believe that something related to IoT devices should be improved.

I have been using Dynatrace since 2018. It's been four and a half years.

We are using both a SaaS and an on-premises version.

It is both on-premises and hybrid.

They are hosted by Google, Microsoft Azure, as well as AWS.

Dynatrace is a stable solution. It's rock solid. We have never had an issue.

Dynatrace is scalable. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have an application, management, and support teams looking into things. We have our help desk and service desk looking at various dashboards. Certain dashboards are being examined by our developers. It is frequently used by between 60 and 80 people.

I believe we are currently using all of the functions and features. It's operational, it's production, it's living and breathing.

I would rate the technical support a four out of five.

Positive

We were looking at Dynatrace at the time, and then there was AppDynamics or something like that, I believe, which Cisco eventually purchased. Dynatrace's maturity level at the time far outstripped that of anything else on the market.

In 2018 it was a superior product.

The initial setup is straightforward. I'll be up and monitoring in four hours. The on-premises installation was a little more difficult due to network firewalls and so on. Overall, it went well.

This solution can be deployed and maintained by four people.

For us, the most important thing was to get OneAgent out everywhere. Once we had the OneAgent in place, we began building out, and understanding what applications are present, and start developing the monitoring aspects. Not just from conventional RAM CPU calculations, but truly looking at the applications, and examining the Java functions, as well as the MongoDB functions.

Having all of that information and being able to create dashboards to communicate it not only to the higher-ups but also to the developers doing the development, who must understand that they must be very smart with their code.

We are a consulting company. Within our organization, we have a Dynatrace division. However, for this installation, in particular, we collaborated with Dynatrace on product implementation.

We saw a return on investment. The downtime has been reduced, which is significant in and of itself.

I would rate the return on investment a five out of five.

I am not aware of the licensing fees.

We evaluated AppDynamics.

I would recommend following the instructions. It's easy to understand.

Nothing is very perfect. I would rate Dynatrace a nine out of ten.

It's used in two major use cases:

1. Monitoring and our own internal IT operations. 
2. We provide our customers access to Dynatrace tenants so customers can also leverage developing their code running on our platform.

It does full stack monitoring for internal operations, problem diagnostics, APM use cases, and performance management for our customers.

We have multiple instances of Dynatrace running, where about half of them are running in our data centers and the other half are running in the public cloud. Therefore, it's a hybrid deployment. We use a mixture of cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure (running Kubernetes), and Google Cloud Platform.

We have traditional deployments on VMware virtual machines as well as running stuff in the cloud. We have a couple hundred Kubernetes clusters monitoring using Dynatrace. Dynatrace's functionality in this area is unmatched combined with its full stack visibility, ease of deployment, and completely dynamic changes. The container environments are also dynamic since you have microservices spinning up and down as you go. I have never seen another tool doing this with the same reliability. 

Dynatrace has improved our organization through operational support. We also have a large services organization which directly works with customers, and sometimes you run into situations where customers ask how they can improve their applications. Traditionally, these service teams would go for assessments. Eventually, they would even go onsite and through performance workshops with them to find some low hanging fruits that could address, and this was very tedious work. By introducing Dynatrace, you suddenly have real-time data. Then, the process of doing performance reviews switches from workshops or a defined time frame analysis (and then taking actions) to a more continuous approach where you constantly have Dynatrace performance data of the landscape. 

Service engineers save a lot of time because they can just go in look at the data and share it with the customer, who has the same view, and say, "Here's an improvement which can be immediately implemented." It's not like a collection of big, multiple findings that are consolidated into one results presentation, then the customer needs to do something. It's more like a continuous performance analysis and improvement process, which is more efficient than those workshops approaches. That's one of the biggest of the advantages that our services team sees because it helps DevOps to focus on continuous delivery and shift quality issues to pre-production.

Dynatrace is tightly integrated with ITSM. It's integrated with ServiceNow, which our support team is using.

We provide a platform, then the customer ships the code and deploys it. Therefore, we rely on testing by the customer, and sometimes, they miss something and it breaks. Then, it doesn't work as expected so we have to step in, and say, "Yes, your site is down," or "It's not functioning properly." We do the analysis because typically the customer says, "Okay, it's not us. It must be you as the service provider." This is where we gain a lot of efficiency. The support team is the first line of defense there. They get the information to determine if they are able to quickly pinpoint the problem. E.g., the customer deployed, then two hours later, issues were occurring. This is when you don't want to waste time. Our support engineers need the visibility so they can immediately be able to communicate to the customer, saying, "Yes, it's on our side," or "It's on your side." If it's on the customer's side, they can let them know exactly where they need to go. This is where we gain most of the time.

It helps our operations that the solution uses a single agent for automated deployment and discovery. If you think about all the work in the past where we had different agents, tools, or scripts deployed to monitor specific aspects of an environment and different tools, then having one agent definitely helps. For example, for our rollout, when we migrated all the different tools to Dynatrace, we did this over the weekend. We installed the agent, then just watched the data and findings coming in, which was a huge benefit. We installed one thing an it discovers everything.

I suppose the solution has decreased time to market for our individual customers with new innovations/capabilities. Dynatrace helps them gain better insights, allowing them to do another deployment faster.

It has auto detection of almost everything. The full stack capabilities to get one agent deployed allows you not to worry about anything else because the agent detects everything. This is in combination with the AI so you don't need to worry about any baselines or setting up any thresholds. This is all done automatically, which brings us the biggest benefit.

Configuration as code integrating through APIs is really important when automating at scale. If you think about the tens of thousands of hosts that you deploy to, then APIs are key when automating deployments, the management of those instances, and configuration as well as integrating with other systems without sophisticated or far reaching APIs. 

Dynatrace easily integrates with our infrastructure or applications, then reliably triggers self-healing actions or remediation actions. This is something that we really love to use because it definitely removes a lot of human interaction. You just let the machine to do the job and can trust it, and that's the most important. I have seen systems where the users were very reluctant to trust the system to take actions where typically a human would do the job manually. Dynatrace considers all the information that it gathers, then triggers self-healing actions which are quite reliable. It doesn't need a lot of human adjustment to make it work.

We use real-user monitoring a lot to get insight into end users and our customers, e.g., customer behavior. 

While the integrations are great, sometimes our customers are not as far as long in Dynatrace concepts from a technical perspective as they need to be, whether it's a cultural thing and educational thing. Thus, some of our customers are not as advanced as Dynatrace would like them to be. From a technical perspective, all the capabilities are there but the concepts are not yet spread out within the ecosystem to their fullest extent. Therefore, Dynatrace is ahead of its time.

Documentation could be improved. E.g., you don't know how to properly use Dynatrace because documentation is almost lacking behind the features being deployed.

On very large deployment scenarios, the APIs for configuration and configuration management came in slowly. This is something that is good already but could be better.

In the product, I am missing some configuration automation APIs.

The company has been using Dynatrace on different occasions for the past eight years. The current product of Dynatrace has only been out for four years.

We operate services for our customers with pretty high SLAs. We guarantee the systems we run are reliable. We also guarantee uptime. In the past three years, we have run up to 50 updates with Dynatrace and had only one or two issues where the system had to be brought down. There are almost no issues at all with stability. It is rock-solid.

They are improving constantly with every release and adding new stuff. We have updates about every two weeks.

We have about 2,500 people using it.

We currently manage seven Dynatrace clusters with several thousand Dynatrace tenants, then in total almost 30,000 hosts are monitored with Dynatrace. We're not reaching the limits of Dynatrace's scalability. This is probably one of the largest deployments, but we have not seen any limitations so far.

We want to leverage even more services:

• Real-user monitoring
• Possibly look into session replay.
• Expand the footprint of synthetic monitoring.
• Build more integrations by leveraging all the data Dynatrace captures for custom metrics into our BI reporting, billing systems, internal cross charging functionality, and scaling/optimizing our environments in terms of resource usage. 

There is a lot of data in Dynatrace at the moment that we do not fully utilize.

The technical support is great. We have a pretty good contract with Dynatrace for contacting support. They are pretty responsive and very knowledgeable. You get a DevOps engineer from Dynatrace jumping on immediately with very high expertise. You don't get the typical Level 1 automated standard reply: "Yes, we will take care of it," but then you have to ping back.

We came from a former product of Dynatrace, which was called AppMon, and not really sold anymore. Though, there are customers who still use it out there. We used it for the traditional APM scenario, then migrated to Dynatrace to extend the visibility for hybrid cloud deployment.

We had been using a mixture of Opsview, Splunk, SolarWinds, and other tools. We switched because of the complexity of managing all these tools. It became unmaintainable. E.g., historically, people would write scripts for Nagios Opsview, then maintain them. If we lost the people who had been maintaining those scripts, then nobody knew how the checks worked for those custom scripts. Also, the maintenance overhead was pretty high.

From the perspective of the end users using different monitoring solutions, you had different teams who had to go to different tools and contend with data in one tool not being exactly the same data as another tool. While the overlap between tools was there, the complexity in accessing those tools and knowing how to use those tools became a big organizational and maintenance overhead that we decided to pull them all into one tool to harmonize it. We wanted one tool where the interface and data are the same regardless of whatever you're monitoring.

The initial setup was straightforward. We looked into Dynatrace and were able to roll it out to 12,000 hosts within four weeks. 

From the Managed version, you can have it installed and up and running in less than an hour. This is on the condition that you have the hardware to install it on and access to the systems/services that you want to monitor.

Initially, some people were skeptical about the one agent really working, so we did test it. Now, we have had so many good experiences that when we deploy, build new services, or spin up new instances, Dynatrace is one of the first things that is always there. We don't even even test the agents anymore. We completely rely on this mature product that is solid and stable when we deploy staging, development, QA environments, or playgrounds. There is no deployment without Dynatrace agents.

We deployed Dynatrace ourselves as we have a lot experience working with it. Deploying Dynatrace depends on the environments that you run it on. Since that was all orchestrated with things like Puppet, Chef and Ansible for us, it just was a matter writing a bit of automation code that it wasn't already in place. One person was needed to do this properly, and it is not that hard of work because it applies to almost every environment that we deploy. For new services that we provide, it's done within the development teams writing those services. Therefore, there is no dedicated Dynatrace team responsible for integrating Dynatrace with services.

There is almost an API for everything. If you run it Managed, this means you have to administer Dynatrace's installation yourself. You run it and take care of some prerequisites, like sizing. Any system updates, back fixes, or upgrades to the whole cluster have almost zero maintenance. All you need to do is confirm it or let Dynatrace update itself. In the past three years, we had almost 50 updates or installations where we didn't even need to touch anything. We just had one or two occasions where an update broke functionality, and those were fixed with next update and within hours. It's almost self-maintaining.

We do have a dedicated staff for maintenance, but this team is not spending a lot of time on actually managing Dynatrace. They do the integrations of Dynatrace and other tools as well as development of custom integrations and configurations. This team is also responsible for the infrastructure and ensuring the machines Dynatrace runs on are scaled or adjusted properly. However, this is minor effort for them. We have a dedicated team of 20 to 30 SRE engineers and their responsibility is not only to Dynatrace. They are responsible for the whole infrastructure and surrounding tools.

As we use it internally, our internal operations have gained a lot more efficiency. The time to resolution and triage problems in different environments has been reduced by 50 percent, if not more. When Dynatrace raises a problem, the team does not need to bring together experts from other teams to look at the problem, log files, etc. You almost have Dynatrace training our support engineers because it's so easy to pinpoint the root cause of problems.

The solution has decreased our mean time to identification by approximately 50 percent.

There has been a positive impact on the instances run for our customers. Overall, uptime got better because we became faster at fixing the problems causing downtime.

The solution has saved us money through the consolidation of tools. With a hybrid landscape, we had multiple tools. When we consolidated, we removed four or five other monitoring tools with one. For the last ROI calculation that I did, Dynatrace was saving us up to $500,000 per year. 

In addition, our speed is up 40 to 50 percent. Therefore, our human cost and licensing savings together are one to two million.

We are a very big customer. We obviously have a special price point. 

If there are no corporate requirements to run Dynatrace Managed (operating it yourself), I would definitely go for the size option. For small and medium-sized companies, the size option is probably the cheapest one. You don't need to look into operating it. You don't need to run hardware. It is pay as you go. 

We looked into what can Dynatrace could actually replace. If the price point is high, think about the impact it would have to the entire organization to constantly replace monitoring tools. If implemented correctly, then it has a lot of saving potentials for the organization. That is something that should go into any ROI calculation.

We looked at the other big player in this space: New Relic and AppDynamics. Looking at the cloud, full stack capabilities, ease of deployment, and scalability that Dynatrace has, they definitely stood out in comparison. The full stack story was pretty compelling, where you have one agent deployed and it provides everything.

Trust what it's doing. Don't question what it's doing. If you don't understand it yet, take the time to try to understand it. Do not implement or force the old ways of monitoring onto a completely different approach, like Dynatrace. That's definitely that the biggest lesson a lot of people in our organization had to go through. 

Be curious and embrace the different approach. It is definitely worth it. The different approach that it does is a good one. It's different but it's something that actually works. Those guys know what they have built and what they are doing.

It is partly integrated with CI/CD. We are operating a platform with our applications, but our customers are responsible for testing and CI/CD deployed into our environments. Internally, some of our teams use it. The majority of our CI/CD deployment is our customers' responsibility, and while we do provide them Dynatrace for CI/CD, we do not control how they integrate it.

We are in the process of rolling out synthetic monitoring at scale to replace other tools. 

We are not yet using session replay, which is mostly due to data compliance restrictions. We have very hard data privacy protections. We do have customers who are highly interested in using the feature, but we are not using it at the moment.

Overall, I would give the solution a clear 10 (out of 10).